I sing your praise Mysterious Lady of the Sea, I sing your praise Ix’Chel, I sing your praise Cozumel. I sing of your beauties and your mysteries for all to hear.
As you no doubt gathered from the none too subtle opening of this post, I’m thoroughly enthused by our scuba trip to Cozumel. Expectations exceeded.
I’m curious what you guys think about tipping in dive shops. I really am.
If there was a D&C dive shop I think we’d have a sign saying “Unless it’s about the new hot place in town, we don’t take tips”. Yes, we would probably have to charge more. I wonder if that would fly.
Here’s a few visual tidbits, of middling quality and interest, to tie you over in case you’re not diving any time soon and you’ve already scrolled through all the search results for scuba on google images.
Bocas Del Toro is a very chill town, and Bocas Diving Pirates is a very chill dive shop. Chill but professional, don’t let the laid back vibe fool you, these guys are good, real good and they work hard. You don’t have to touch your gear unless you want to. The instruction quality is also excellent. I was listening to el jefe Alex instruct new divers before a DSD and everything was on point, precise, yet humorous. This is not the kind of shop where they “forget” to ask for your certification card or where the DMs dive by intuition rather than by decompression tables. Oxygen rescue kit on every dive, not something we’ve seen very often on our travels. The crew was super nice and quickly made us feel like part of the team, besides Alex, we got to know Omar, our DM Charlie and our groovin’ dancin’ boat stearin’ captain Bernardino. That’s one reason I prefer smaller dive shops, you get to make connections with people (provided you’re not a jackass to start with), and that takes the diving to a different level. You get to know the DM(s) and they get to know you and how you dive.
This is much less a proper post and more a cheap excuse to show you a bunch of pictures. Also I did one of those a little while ago and some of you enjoyed it. So here are more reasons why dive, granted most of them only tangentially make any sense, but it’s one of those days.